The Developmental Desire: The Crucible of Masculinity, from Nehru to Modi

The recent boom in critical literature engaging with the development/masculinity nexus in contemporary India requires unpacking and further critique, not to over-emphasize the need for a grounded understanding of that dyad. India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi are brought to conversation over their developmental thought vis-à-vis their masculinities and the way they reflected and guided people’s desire for development. While doing so, the article interrogates the tendency to see political leaders as the protagonists of change while ignoring their simultaneous production within the social discourses of their times. In the process it corrects the assumption that leaders like Nehru and Modi contained within them singular and coherent versions of what they believed development to be and proposes that far from being stable carriers of their developmental thought, they betrayed contradictions within and such spillages defined their developmental character.